tao1776

I grew up in the typical small New England community of the 50's and 60's. Our neighborhood was the usual mish-mash of Canuck, Pollock and assorted American mutts. My street was an oil sprayed, dirt paved road topped with a large white Baptist church. Three houses below that stood the Catholic church. Seven houses below that lay the proverbial "package store." A small Polish mom & pop operation that sold cigarettes, booze, meat and a huge array of penny candy with an assortment of anything else that you might need. My mother would faithfully tend to the graves of our deceased family members on Memorial day. Her routine varied little from year to year. She bought the same kind of flowers and tended the graves in her usual stoic way. Talk of the yearly parade would always gravitate towards an attempt to get my Dad to march. He never expressed much interest. He was one of the few WWII vets that we knew, except for the few friends and co-workers and VFW members tha...

When we bought this house twenty eight or so years ago, this room sported a bottom half covered by a very cheap barn-board like paneling. The top half was covered with a velvet orange wallpaper containing raised gold designs throughout the pattern. The ceiling light was a pull down lantern. The doorway from the kitchen had swinging saloon doors. And yes, there were mirrors stuck on one wall above a makeshift bar. It was truly an East meets West bar lounge. Did I fail to mention that all the woodwork was painted black? After some major renovations we finally opted for a three light ceiling fan. Looked nice. I could have passed into old glory or the nether worlds without ever exchanging the light for another. But as wives do, she began to obsess about the light. She needed a new look. She bronzed the base and stain-painted the paddles. She made new shades. But she was not satisfied. Then came the Pottery Barn Edison Light . The light came with no instruction on how to map out the place...

"Spiritual friendship, association with wise and noble friends, and wise and noble deeds are the whole of the holy life." the Buddha I, ve been watching some of the recurrent thoughts that arise to chastise me and one of the little buggers is the thought and the subsequent feelings of loneliness. When I was studying and reaching for a life as a Christian pastor, I felt a like-mind with several brothers and sisters that I had met along the way. Sometimes it seemed easy to extend grace toward one another. It was a time of embracing. There was value in " not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together." This friendship has not been duplicated since. I bear some responsibility for this. The level of fundamentalist Christian teaching that I withstood, questioned, and then left behind, left me lacking in trust of an organized anything: (see previous post) I have since relied on some of the friendships that developed through blogger to replace that which was not pres...

I've been working diligently on trying to reconcile the various aspects of This Being Human... There are too many sides to that which makes up for me being Tao1776. That is, being from the "West" and having been born American and raised as a Christian creates a common indelible flavor that doesn't exist in many other parts of the world. And to top it off, many of us are genetically nothing more than mutts. This is not noted as something that is either good or bad, it is just my observation. Add to this the feeling that America has grown into a complex conglomeration of humanity; a mass of shallow one celled amoebas that live by being fed by a doctrine of constant consumerism. A nation of hungry ghosts with large bellies and mouths too small to be filled fast enough. I am often left feeling as if I'm living in a world of reality TV Talk Soup clips . Entering the stream of a more universal sort of observation, I have splashed about in the waters of the Chris...